Wednesday, November 28, 2001 (6:40pm)
It's been a long time since I've posted because of my insane killer week, then four days at home, and more insane killer work this week. I have an essay due tomorrow (I think...she may not care that much if I don't finish it tonight) and the other one originally due tomorrow was extended to Monday. So I don't have the time for a full run down on what I've been up to. Here's what I posted to the Airline list on my flights, though, until I have time to post more.
22 Nov - US 4031: Montreal-Dorval Int'l (YUL) -> Greater Pittsburgh Int'l (PIT)
This flight left on time at 8:25am but I had to get to the airport extra special early because I was splitting a cab with a friend catching the 7:30 to Philadelphia. I spent the time in the gate area checking my email with my laptop. As it was last time, check-in was very quick; probably five minutes from out of the taxicab to the gate, including United States pre-clearance immigration and customs. It took me the same last month when I flew, when I was actually stupid enough to buy the hype and go to the terminal two hours in advance. Security was a bit more thorough this time, with a hand search of my carryon and my friend and I were both required to place our laptops on the belt when they went through the machine, as well as boot them up at the end. Pre-clearance was a snap. Stamped my passport crooked on a clean page in the middle, which they never used to do at all until this recent business. Why a returning United States citizen needs his passport stamped is beyond me but there it goes.
Flight was a Do 328, my first time on one (hopefully last). Decent for a 30 pax turboprop I guess. I was sitting right next to the starboard engine and it was quite quiet. Does it have active sound cancellation like the Saab 340B+? Seats stunk but there you have it...turboprop aviation at its best. Only real complaint was the excessive two second darkening of the cabin at startup of either engine. Made a nice clunk noise too like when a fuse blows in your house. Not what I've come to expect from German engineering.
Second in line for takeoff just behind a Bombardier Dash-8 Q-200 test frame. Lots of Air Canada DC-9s lined up at their maintenance hanger, ready to vanish forever, I suppose. Just before the initial descent into Pittsburgh, we flew about fifteen miles ESE of my hometown of Warren, PA (Brokenstraw Airport - PA11), over the Allegheny reservoir. It took me about four hours to get back there. Inauspiciously, the pilot announced we were ninety miles outside Pittsburgh, which we definitely were not by a long shot, though he did land at the right airport despite his cartographic shortcomings. Shortly after that we went directly over my grandmother's house about 60 mi. southwest of Warren, and the Clarion County airport (11D), where I've taken flying instruction in the past, at about 10,000 feet. No landmark in the world I know better from the air than that. Landed at PIT about 10 minutes later. First time I've ever flown over anywhere I know well on a clear day in a commercial flight, so I was somewhat excited. Arrived on time at about 11:30.
22 Nov - US 5762: Greater Pittsburgh Int'l (PIT) -> Erie Int'l-Tom Ridge Field (ERI)
Embraer ERJ-145 flight, my first time on a US Airways operated JungleJet. Smooth, comfortable flight, about 15 minutes in the air. Arrived fifteen minutes early at Erie; baggage arrived ten minutes early.... Erie Int'l was renamed Tom Ridge Field about a year and a half ago in honor of our then-governor and first nationally prominent politician to come out of northwestern Pennsylvania since...well, ever. Now of course, he's the national Homeland Security Director and so, if terrorists are interested in purely symbolic embarrassment to the government (which, since their previous attack was against the two most capacious office buildings in the country, I doubt very much), it would be a prime target. Of course, thanks to the U.S. armed forces, there are now a fair number fewer terrorists out there breathing decent folks' air, so thank goodness for that.
25 Nov - US 2223: Erie Int'l-Tom Ridge Field (ERI) -> Greater Pittsburgh Int'l (PIT)
Totally packed F-100 flight, very largely returning university students such as myself. Security screening, assisted by three Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, began about twenty minutes before departure time and proceeded quite smoothly despite only one checkpoint. Once more laptops were to be removed and put on the belt, though I wasn't required to wake it up this time. My bag was not searched by hand but every passenger was wand searched and frisked. (Also, all cars entering the airport premises had their trunks examined by Erie police officers and a police dog, presumably TNT sniffing though probably either drugs or just the most heinous looking mutt they could find in the pound to keep up appearances.) Flight pushed back slightly late but more than made up the time in arriving at the gate about five minutes before the jetway operator. Approach to PIT was the most textbook Cessna-style traffic pattern I've ever flown in an airliner.
25 Nov - US 4039: Greater Pittsburgh Int'l (PIT) -> Montreal-Dorval Int'l (YUL)
PIT was quite a bit busier than I had expected based on the traffic estimates before the holiday. Once more, many students. Actually, every flight I took this trip was at least 85% full, so that's good news for an airline which Forbes gave an 80% chance of liquidating and which is the largest employer in Western Pennsylvania. Quick connection this time, about 45 minutes, to yet another Do 328. Taxiing out, passed a 722 "Champion Air," white body with dark fin. Never heard of this outfit. Any details?
Cloudy flight this time, couldn't see anything. Circled east over Laval and turned around over St-Léonard, and final over Côte-Vertu Blvd to arrive on (I think) 6L. Arrived in Montreal on time or thereabouts at 10:45pm; quick trip through Canada Customs and Immigration and baggage retrieval - too quick as it turned out, as I left an airliner book (The Big Six from Airlife) that I'd just bought that very evening in the seat pocked in front of me. I filed a lost article claims this morning (didn't realize what I'd done until arriving back at my place). How annoying. Oh well.
Anyway, back to work today. Fifteen page essay on Renaissance Italian banking due Thursday. Should go work on that, or perhaps book a ticket for Christmas. Three weeks to go and I'll be back in the air.
Yep, it was cool flying over home. I thought that flight probably went pretty close the last trip I took that way but now I'm sure. By the way, Champion Air is, fittingly, a sports charter. Still don't know about the Dornier sound cancelling, though. Anybody?
Wednesday, December 5, 2001 (12:17am)
Wow, it's been a very long time since I've done a real one of these. You will be happy (or not, I suppose, doesn't really matter to me) to hear that I'm finally all done with my many papers for the term. Three's the max for next term, that's all I have to say.
Doing the update tonight is a little different than it has been. I discovered a thing called "educational software pricing," which means that I can get insanely expensive, deluxe software packages at food stamp prices because I have a current university student ID. The upshot of this is that I now own Macromedia Dreamweaver/Fireworks, for only about $145 US. I feel it is a legitimate purchase since my discretionary spending in the last month and a half has been running somewhere between zilch and chewing gum. Eventually, I suppose, I'll come up with a flashier design here but that'll be sometime down the road since I think, from looking at this puppy, that it is going to take a while to learn. It looks really hardcore.
I promised last week that I was going to talk about my trip home sometime, and I guess I will. There are a lot of other things I'd like to talk about as well, since the earth has kept spinning while I've been, well, otherwise occupied. But I want to get a well-earned early night tonight, so perhaps tomorrow. (You'll perhaps understand I'm not really in the mood for writing anything thoughtful just now.) In the meantime, you might note that I made InstaPundit today, so go check it out.
Now, if I can just figure out how to make this thing upload....
Thursday, December 6, 2001 (10:38am)
So...apparently the Taliban have agreed to surrender Kandahar and then go out back and slit their bellies. Actually, I just made up that last part, but if they were more civilized thugs, that's what they'd be doing. I can see it now: Osama bin Laden seated cross-legged with his scimitar, Mullah Omar standing over him, ready to strike his head off as soon as he has thrust the tip into his navel. Hmm...maybe not. I suspect that the ole' AK-47 in the back of the mouth is more plausible.
Apparently the Marines are over there vaporizing the contents of as many caves as they can find (which I'm betting is a lot from the pictures I've seen). Must be hell on the Afghan wino population. I wonder if we'll ever actually find him or whether we'll just be doomed to thirty or forty years of tabloid "Osama Sightings" in every sleazy motel between Memphis and Mazar-e Sharif. And if we did find him, what then? The Romans had a lovely old custom of parading conquered potentates like Vercingetorix and Jugurtha through the city and then strangling them in the Forum. After that, he should be stuffed and put in the Smithsonian. As for the rank-and-file, if I may induldge in a bit more sadism and blood-lust, we might combine two practices of our grand republics and line up all these baddies, decimate them (maybe twice, there are a lot of them), then ship the survivors off to our nastiest, filthiest federal prisons, full of crack dealing gang-bangers who hate the Man but love their country. Sort of like putting that Turk who shot the Pope in prison in Italy. I'm not sure that the bleeding hearts would go for any of this too much, and at any rate Osama seems likely to pull a Cleopatra on us. I suppose the Northern Alliance badmotherfuckers have their own plans for the rest, too. Oh well, I guess that sort of thing wouldn't really fit the kind of national image we are trying to cultivate anyway. Tommy Franks seems like a very unlikely Aemilius Paulus to me.
It took rather longer to capture Kandahar than I had expected, though really not that long at all in historical perspective. When I was passing through the Pittsburgh airport Thanksgiving on my way home, I got tremendous amusement from the side-by-side juxtaposition of the two local papers. Huge headline on the Tribune-Review: "Taliban agree to surrender!" On the Post-Gazette: "Taliban: No surrender." Steel City journalism at its best. Both featured large photos of surly looking Afghan warriors, though whether they were our friends or enemies was as hard to tell as ever. Anyway, I decided to risk erring on the side of optimism and still expected to see our troops marching through by the pumpkin pie course, especially after the hated Cowboys got stampeded by Denver - a propitious omen if ever there was one. But alas.
Anyway, enough about the present conflict. As you can probably tell from the general flow of this entry, I've been rather too busy lately to pay real attention to actual news events upon which to comment, though I'm willing to parcel out some of the blame to the vile CBC coverage I've been subjected to. How was my trip home, you ask? Well...it had its moments I suppose. It was flat out ugly there (especially from the plane) because all the leaves were long gone and the snow unwilling to do its part, and the news was by and large troubling, so those two things rather put a patina on everything else.
What news? Well, in addition to the sorry chances of US Airways to live long and prosper, the rest of the economic situation is dismal as well. International Paper in Erie is shutting down, laying off many people and putting a lot of lumber and railroad jobs in Warren in jeopardy. In Warren, Loranger Manufacturing got fucked by Ford and is laying off massively. So is Blair. Out east, Bethlahem Steel unexpectedly (at least to me) croaked. I'm sure there are others, too; in fact, nearly every one of the local newspapers for the last month that I opened had some bad regional economic news. But all is not so bad: the Aryan Nations are moving their headquarters from Idaho to Coudersport. Now I know that I've long been thinking, "You know, what we really need around here are more Nazis!" and I'm sure you have too. The same day I read that in the paper, I spotted a van from Bob Jones University in the municipal parking lot. Perhaps they had heard the news and were spotting out the possibility of a branch campus? (The local people are always talking about how we need a college; after all, Bradford and Meadville have one!) And I'll bet those folk hate the Taliban too....
Yet aside from the painful awareness of the seediness of the motherland these days, it wasn't a bad trip really. I ate quite well, saw a fair number, though not all, of the people I wanted to see. I behaved quite exemplarly - no booze, drugs, or dirty women - and got a lot of sleep. The weather was lovely. I almost met up with Midn. Nick and his bro in the woods to camp out Friday night (which was dazzling...what's up with this winter?) but the rangers forgot to sprinkle the bread crumbs on the so-called nature trail down to where they were, or maybe I just couldn't see them in the dark, but at any rate I got thoroughly lost several times and had to navigate back out to the road by the stars. I kept on coming out within fifty feet of my truck, which seemed like the woods mocking me ("Bwa ha ha, you can can find your car but you'll never find your friends!"). So I'd turn around and pluge back in, wander around for ten more minutes, get lost, head back out, and then repeat. Finally I got pissed off and left, leaving my airline ticket stub under their windshield wiper as a calling card. That must have blown their minds.
So...I'm more or less caught up now, an hour later. Yippee.
Dad has alerted me to a historical episode that might serve as an alternative model for dealing with Osama in keeping with the samurai theme I started with below. Apparently in the 1580s, a new shogun had his vanquished enemy buried upright as far as his neck in the middle of Kyoto (I think), so that his head was all that stuck out above the surface. He was left like that for several days, until he perished, and the locals were encouraged to come along and make trenchant observations about his predicament. I'm still keen on having Osama installed in the Smithsonian so that future generations can come and gawk at him and laugh at what a peculiar-looking little weasel he is (was). Perhaps we should get in touch with President Putin and see about having him send over Vladimir Ilyich (they're always talking about burying him anyway) in exchange for some hard currency, and make it a whole thematic exhibition. We'll call it "The Rudolph Guiliani Dustbin of History Wing."
Monday, December 10, 2001 (9:40pm)
"One thing is true: you've got to turn on evil when it's coming after you. You've got to face it down and when it tries to hide, you've got to go in after it and never be denied."
I notice that I missed remarking on the anniversary of the Montréal Massacre last time, a passing I have duly noted on here in years past. There have been a number of observances and so forth here on campus and elsewhere around the city. The usual posters have gone up with the victims' photos and I'm sure their monument in Côte-des-Neiges has flowers and cards on it. It's still a very sad thing to think about, of course. Nonetheless, in light of the current situation in the world I couldn't help but think that it might be being misinterpreted even still.
The most significant outcome of the massacre, besides an endless stream of male-baiting violence-against-women seminars, was the passage of federal firearms control in Canada, which has been increased in strictness over the years. Yet if any of those women had had a snubnosed .38 in her purse that day, would it have ended in so great a tragedy? It seems rather the wrong lesson was learned. Now even fewer citizens can take their personal safety, and that of others around them, into their own hands. It's the same situation with airport security. We are all giving up more and more responsibility for our own safety to minumum wage rent-a-cops, who at least in the United States we can soon count upon to bring the same level of professionalism to their job as the good folks at the DMV or INS. Of course, the dereliction of duty by these same bozos led to this in the first place (and I'm incriminating not just airport security but the CIA, FBI, INS, and everybody else - but especially that prick John Ashcroft - I can think of). I feel better already and I'm flying again in a week.
Shortly after the attack, I noted on the Airline list that if licensed gun owners were permitted to carry on board aircraft, Satan would certainly be in long johns before any flights from states like Pennsylvania or Texas got hijacked. I said this partially in jest, but now thinking about those poor women at the École Polytechnique and listening to Neil Young's great new pro-war song "Let's Roll," I can't help but think that there's something to this. Or maybe I'm just crazy. You decide. What I do know is that when Marc Lepine burst in on that engineering class and started blazing away, his last word were "I hate feminists." I can't think of a more radical form of female self-empowerment than splattering that bastard's brains all over the wall.
Tuesday, December 11, 2001 (11:53am)
Venezuela is just now recovering from an apparently successful general strike against President Hugo Chavez. Successful, that is, in that nothing was working in the whole country, not successful in that he was flying off in the middle of the night with a few million in cash and a lot of jewels in a suitcase. Still, he sounds plenty scared. I wonder what my somewhat parochial socialist friends would say about this, a general strike against a left wing despot who's doing all the things they think is hunky dory. Actually, I know exactly what they'd say - some nonsense about the people having false consciousness and being co-opted by bourgeois threats. They were plenty outraged when Daniel Ortega lost in Nicaragua, too. Whatever. All this goes to show is the total irrelevence outside the academy of Marxist thinking. ¡Viva la revolucion!
Wednesday, December 12, 2001 (9:30pm)
One of the first things I thought after the September 11 attacks (and the footage of dancing, jubilant Palestinians) was how much I would like to see Chairman Arafat's head on a pike. It appears now I may get my chance. Contrary to the ignorant beliefs of the Palestinian populace (who have little way of knowing better) and their Western apologists (who do), America's calls for restraint in the Middle East had for the better part of a decade been all that kept the Israelis from bulldozing the entire occupied zone and salting the earth therein. But as they have now shown themselves utterly incapable to refrain from eviscerating families at malls, students at the pizza parlor, or commuters on the bus, that protection is no longer much going to matter. At any rate, for Americans, terrorism isn't any longer something that happens to other people. I feel bad for the Palestinians on some level, really I do, but, as the Marxists might say, it appears to be historical necessity that they suffer some more now. The Israelis, however, do have some questions to answer about the reports out today that their spooks in the U.S. - now in the custody of Papa Ashcroft - had advance warning of the September 11 attack, which they withheld from us. That shit isn't going to win them many friends either.
Meanwhile back in Afghanistan, the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda are enduring under an air assault equal to what we dropped on Dresden back in the great war. Of course, that was on a city - and a rather fine one, too - and this is on shitty, sparsely occupied mountains. It may take a while to get them, though the Smithsonian should still be putting out bids on the taxidermy. Incidentally, at this point, in all liklihood the danger to the civilian population of Afghanistan - such as it ever was by the grim standards of air war - has probably come to an effective end, though I understand humanitarian aid is getting backed up at the border.
In totally different news, a column in the Times today - recommended to me by my Classics professor this morning - reports that Latin studies may be coming back as a result of - no kidding - Harry Potter. Apparently Gladiator was a big boost for Roman history too when it came out. Hey, I study Latin, I'm all for this, but it's still a bit weird to be deemed cutting edge by Maureen Dowd. Oh well, I guess I'll take what I can get. In the mean time, though, I have studying to do, for Latin happily enough.
Thursday, December 13, 2001 (11:14pm)
It looks like there might be an Internet rumble shaping up between Virginia Postrel, Nick Gillespie and the Reason folk and Jonah Goldberg at National Review, who went off on one of his periodic fits about libertarianism today. That could be pretty good, if the former take the bait. The last time somebody took a swing at Nick about the drug stuff, he came back with this, which was pretty good. We should be so lucky for another like it, really. Jonah's column, though I agree with his take on our finer nasty boozes even if I'm a gin man myself, is a pretty good exposition of why, in the Hayekian tradition, I am Not a Conservative. As time goes by, I feel more and more justified about my "cretinous conservative" slam.
I have been reading through the posts from the last week and note that they are mostly rather charged with violent energy, which is not how I really think of myself necessarily. I think I've had a lot of repressed negative emotional energy this term, resulting from my sense of frustration about both events in the world and here at school, as well as their occasional convergence (about which I think I've said enough already). Indeed, I took the September 11 attack rather personally. I've never been in a position of someone - indeed, many - wanting to kill me before. It's not personal, of course, it's just because I am who I am - white, middle class, American, quasi-Christian. But it cuts rather close to the bone nonetheless. A friend of Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian caught at New Year's two years back trying to bring high explosives into Washington, is in custody and apparently was planning to blow up the intersection of Laurier and Du Parc here in Montréal, which is about three blocks away from my apartment, where I grocery shop. (He also had designs against the métro, which I ride infrequently.) When the twin towers came down, there were no less than four people witnessing it whom I know and care about, any of whom could plausibly have been right there or even been killed. In fact, a fireman friend of my aunt and uncle's, whom I believe I met once briefly, was killed. My friend Sue would have been right there in the thick of things had she not overslept her alarm that day. United Airlines flight 93, the one that was brought down by its hero-passengers, flew over my home shortly before it crashed, and could have as easily landed on top of those I love most in the world as in that empty field in Somerset. These things I take very personally.
I've long been of the mind that the Palestinians should receive some sort of settlement. This is justice. But as long as elements among them continue to blow up Israeli civilians, they should get nothing. We in the U.S. have given and will give nothing to those who immolated around 4,000 of our citizens and foreign friends. In fact, we have crushed the regime most responsible in an unprecedentedly successful and remarkably humane military operation thousands and thousands of miles from home in landlocked mountains. The mastermind is hiding in caves and will soon meet Allah (briefly, on his way to whatever sort of hell the Musilims have). To reward homicide invites more, and the Israelis know this. Who am I to say they can't defend themselves against maniacs?
The world is a scary place. We'd all rather forgotten that since the Soviet evil empire rolled over and died like an old dog left out in the cold. I don't think we should necessarily be taking pleasure from the violence and horrors that this world requires of us sometimes - though, as per what I've written beneath, I'm prepared to make exceptions for certain people - but I don't think we can ignore it either, or wish it away with platitudes ("An eye for an eye makes the world blind," etc.) that make things worse ultimately. A little war and bloodshed earlier are better than a lot later. Unfortunately, we've passed up many opportunities for the former and now we may be stuck with sometime more like the latter.
Anyway, now that I've cheered you all up, I'll sign off. Another final exam tomorrow.
Friday, December 14, 2001 (1:13am)
My prediction for a tempest in a teacup (hell, this isn't nearly big enough even for a pot, but it promises to be highly entertaining anyway) is coming partially true. Virginia Postrel is keeping a dignified silence, but I can't help but notice that the link she used to have to Jonah's daily column has disappeared this evening. Hmm.... Anyway, for really sharp commentary on the lame-ass column, have a look here and here (though I find the latter to be a bit distasteful in its slamming of Christianity and Islam).
I went on a dog walk this evening instead of the hardcore studying I was hoping for. I studied hardcore for Latin last night and it's hard to do that two nights in a row. At any rate, this is an important exam but I have until 2:00 tomorrow to work on it. So I'd better hit the hay so I can make it an early morning.
Crips vs. Bloods, take 3: Nick Gillespie has posted his reply to Jonah Goldberg online and it's pretty damn good. (You should also follow his link to his article about Eyes Wide Shut. I miss Suck.com.) He too makes use of Hayek's famous chapter, which Goldberg actually once wrote a column about, claiming he didn't really mean it and that libertarians are actually a kind of conservative whether we like it or not. Curiously, George Will also published a column yesterday bashing libertarians. Talk about a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy! Like Goldberg, he thinks we're faux conservatives. Except for the free love, sex, and rock and roll of course. By this matrix, then, anyone who likes capitalism is by definition a trogladyte. Thanks but no thanks. What the situation actually is, as anyone who stops to think about it for a minute can realize, is that conservatives as we have them today are a kind of perverted libertarian. After all, the classical liberals (isn't it time we take the liberal name back from the Ronald Dworkin crowd et al.?) invented all these groovy ideas back in 1776 and have been refining them ever since. Nineteenth-century English conservatives were mostly against the liberal program. The contemporary conservative movement (isn't that an oxymoron?) dates back to...well, 1960 when Barry Goldwater lost the GOP nomination and began planning his revenge. In the 1970s, the "conservative" Republicans led by Goldwater's victor instituted wage and price controls. Conservatism, being relativistic by definition, doesn't stand for anything except what certain people imagine was the status quo ten minutes ago. At any particular point in time, most conservatives probably agree on most things and every once in a while there is a shake-up in what those things are. Who knows what it will be next? But calling conservatism an ideology instead of what it is, a psychology (albeit a legitimate and understandable one), is bad use of the language.
Anyway, I'll step down from my soapbox now.
One more final exam down this afternoon. I didn't really ever end up studying for it much, though I think I did pretty well. I rarely study much for finals and generally seem to pull off good marks on them (usually better than on the essays I spend weeks sweating over). Knock on wood, of course. I have a really obscure and weird take-home exam for Renaissance and Reformation France to do this weekend and one final in-faculty exam on Monday, then I'm flying home on Tuesday. No one could pick me up at the airport (Pittsburgh) until around 4:00, so I booked a nutty itinerary that is taking me through both Toronto and Chicago. It's seriously tempting fate, but I don't have anything better to do with my day. At any rate, I haven't been to O'Hare in two years now, after about four years of making annual pilgrimages to gape at planes. So that should be good. I'm leaving at 8:00 in the morning and arriving in Pittsburgh at 4:30. Dad is having some professional seminar in Coraopolis or Zelienople or one of those other semi-shitty Pittsburgh areas that have Holiday Inns, so he's swinging by the airport to pick me up after. It'll be good to have a break - I'll have about two and a half weeks home, though I think my friends and I might drive back up here for a couple days around New Year's to hang out and drink legally. We're even considering cruising up to Québec city and trashing a hotel room.
I was walking around town this afternoon before my exam (or, more accurately, before discovering I had the wrong building for my exam written down) and noticed something really fascinating. The Place-des-Arts métro entrance is electrified to repel pigeons. Isn't that quite exceptional? It sounds like such a regressive thing for a city with such a visible abundance of vegans and other animal-fetishists. I mean, there definitely wasn't any bird crap there, but even I think that's pretty extreme, especially since the whole rest of the city is overrun. What I think they ought to do instead is construct some sort of pigeon shangri-la out in the East Island, like the Hamilton steel mill that hosts every seagull in south-central Ontario, and clean up the whole city that way (or at least just the ones who keep shitting on my porch). Maybe I'll go to one of the Montréal mega-city council meetings next year and suggest that. They're cutting the student transit rate 50%, so maybe I'm on a streak.
Monday, December 17, 2001 (10:12pm)
Well...I made it. There were times when the issue seemed in doubt, but I survived the semester. My last final exam was this afternoon. I'm rather skeptical at how I did on it but it's all over now, hallelujah amen whoopty doo. Assuming the weather cooperates (which, after months of abnormally splended fall weather, has suddenly become an issue in the last few days), my plane for home will be taking off at 8:00 tomorrow morning. It's going to be glorious. (I'll try and post something tomorrow about how my flights went.)
Wow, I just realized that I won't have to set foot in the Death Star again for at least a month if I don't want to. What a beautiful world.
Those of you who have been following the intellectual spat between the conservatives and the libertarians (and other conservatives) on the Internet in the last few days have probably noticed that Virginia Postrel posted a somewhat peevish, though sharp, reply last Friday night, which includes links to some other debunkings by non-combatants. She also held out the possibility that she might write more on the subject at some point - tonight perhaps - but in the meantime she's been busy with her new book. (I do hope she finishes it soon since I really want to read it.) The third of Jonah's degenerate bêtes noires, Andrew Sullivan, posted a long and thoughtful reply from his end sometime last week, which Jonah answered this afternoon. I got about a third of the way down through his reply and got bored and quit reading. (I did notice that both men recognized for themselves what I pointed out below, about conservatism being an attitude, not an ideology; or perhaps they've been reading my site....) He promises to write a response to Nick Gillespie and Virginia tomorrow, covering his attacks on them, which is what I'm more interested in (as I've said, I'm no conservative and I find Andrew Sullivan to be a bit too pretentious, so I don't read him regularly). It continues. (Though, if Jonah's opus today serves as any guide for the future, it's starting to lose its snap and become ponderous, like the More vs. Tyndale debate in the 1530s I studied for one of my papers. Pity.)
Anyway, I'm just so fucking delighted to be done with this rotten-ass term that I can't think of a single worthy independent thought to share with you, so I'll end it here. At any rate, I have packing to do and the d-o-g to walk.
Tuesday, December 18, 2001 (11:06am)
Well here I am in Toronto. Air Canada sucks - why I am still willing to fly them after about a 100% fucked-trip rating is beyond me. I missed my connection from here to Chicago due entirely to Air Canada's phenomenal incompetence. It took over a half an hour for them to transfer the luggage from the Rapidair flight from Montréal to the U.S. recheck. So there about two hundred people were, waiting for their luggage. It took me thirty seconds to walk from my arrival gate to the recheck area. Thirty-five fucking minutes! About half the people there, arriving and departing on a dozen different flights, missed their connections, including me. I missed it by the slimmest of margins, after getting precleared by the U.S. customs and immigration very quickly. It was incredibly annoying and the options for rebooking sucked. I could either make Dad wait an hour and a half in Pittsburgh or wait for three hours myself, so that's what I'll do. I don;t know what I'm going to do; I'll be stuck in the baggage claim and without food. Fucking ass holes. Thirty-five minutes to unload a shuttle flight! Say what you will about our U.S. airlines, Air Canada really never fails to impress with its total ineptitude. And it's getting worse.
So I've got an hour and a half before my Pittsburgh flight - a turboprop, to top all. I got my shoes shined (hey, even if you are stranded, you might as well be looking good) already and am watching CNN now, waiting for the daily Rumsfeld press conference and for the bar to start serving booze. Wish me luck.
Wednesday, December 19, 2001 (10:55am)
Wow...yesterday by about this time I had already been shafted by The Nicer Way to Fly; today I'm barely out of bed. This is great.
Two long items this morning, both political in nature. After this I think I'm going to take a bit of a break from the political stuff on here - unless there happens to be something particularly interesting happening - and in general cut back on how much I write here for the break. Or not.
Item one: Mumia Abu Jamal. I've been thinking of writing something on him here for a while, since it's just recently been the twenty year anniversary of his incarceration, and the leftie people I move among, of course, talk a lot about him and the grave injustice of my neo-fascist state in locking him up. That part's all very well and good, of course. I personally wouldn't actually be all that surprised if he were innocent. Now I'm not going to call myself an expert in any way on the situation - I'm sure the lefties have read up on it a lot more than I have, though their sources are probably of questionable objectivity (but that's probably the case with all of us, isn't it?). Anyway, this general lack of in-depth study on the issue (or much interest in the topic at all) notwithstanding, the U.S. District Court's recent vacation of his sentence gives me a good opportunity to present these three points that inform my thinking on the matter to a candid world (if that can describe the lefties):
1) I'm from Pennsylvania. Lived here all my life (except for eleven months that I have spent going to school in Montréal), which coincides almost exactly with Mumia's imprisonment. Not only am I a lifer, so are my parents and grandparents. And in this entire nigh-twenty year relationship with the Keystone State, during which I've visited most every corner, I haven't met one Pennsylvanian, who it seems to me are in the best position to know about the case, that thinks he's innocent. Anarchists from Vancouver, yes; actual Pennsylvanians, no. Now, a few obvious objections: I haven't met all 12 million of us, let alone discussed Mumia with anything more than a sliver of those whom I have. I also live in what might be called the "Red State" half of the commonwealth, which presumably is more amicable to snuffing him, and at any rate is far from the center of the controversy. Still in all, I find this remarkable and have to think it is indicative of something, perhaps a preponderance of evidence against him. Although I had heard of him - afterall, he is the country's most famous prisoner and he is from my state - I never actually realized that there were that many people out there who strongly believed in his innocence until I started following the anti-globalization putsch a few years back, and then went to university. It was an interesting revelation, for as far as I knew, everybody out there was pretty sure he was guilty. And, interestingly enough, I still haven't met any Pennsylvanians who think he's innocent. Maybe if I actually went to school here, that would be more remarkable, but this assortment of innocence skeptics includes a lot of left-oriented people, including this extremely slight acquaintance from Philadelphia, who is all anarchistic, goes to Berkeley for Christ's sake, and actually read the entire court transcripts for the hell of it. And, Red State territory or not, the average western Pennsylvanian takes it as an article of faith that everything about Philadelphia is fundamentally shitty, and this includes, probably above everything else, their '70s era police force, whose vices and general ineptitude are probably a larger part of the hillbilly oral tradition here than on any pinko college campus. I honestly think that most people around here are as predisposed as I am to believe that he could have been set up, but they don't. Is there a reason for this?
2) Probably because he wasn't set up. I once read an interview with former Black Panther media darling Elbridge Cleaver, who wrote probably the most famous prison memoir in American history, raging against the profound evil of the white man's capitalist world and so forth. When he was released, he went and travelled the world looking for social justice and discovered that - shock! - communism sucked ass and the U.S. was, for whatever its considerable faults, about as good as it gets. Then he returned and spilled the beans on his former colleagues and denounced communism. Quite a dramatic arc, wouldn't you say? Anyway, one of his revelations at the time was that the Panthers made it a habit of jumping random police officers, getting whupped, then setting themselves up as victims of police brutality. Of course, all the predictable sorts ate this right up and the Panters got a lot of support. I'm not saying that Daniel Faulkner's murder was one of these scams gone awry - I don't think that the narrative of events supports that conclusion at all - but it calls seriously into question what Mumia's habits of veracity with regards to the police would be.
3) My last point, to my mind, is the most crucial one of all, which is why I've kept it for the end: guilty or not, Mumia isn't going to be executed. Yesterday's ruling is exactly what I've been expecting all this time. The fact is, although we Pennsylvanians have no problem sentencing people to death here - including sorry sacks of shit like this, who aren't going to become any kind of progressive cause celebre - we get pretty squeamish with the actual carrying out of the sentence. Tom Ridge - who despite being vilified by my friend Chris and other friends of Mumia as being an arch-right wing bastard, is considerably more liberal than the Republican party as a whole - campaigned in 1994 largely on the issue of getting the gurneys rolling again after years of backlog. He executed one prisoner. And that is the only execution I can remember happening here in my lifetime, though I suppose Old Sparky might have gotten some use when I was younger that I wasn't aware of. Pennsylvanians are deeply ambivalent about the death penalty; even my father, who's about as representative of conservative northwestern sentiment as it comes (if much better read), generally opposes it. And our politicians are some of the most spineless in the country (which is why Tom Ridge is the first nationally prominent Pennsylvanian in fifteen years, despite our state being one of the Big Five). We aren't even willing to execute anonymous child rapists, liquor store desparados, or stressed out office workers with TEC-9s. We certainly aren't going to execute the most famous and controversial prisoner in the whole republic. Sorry, lefties, this isn't Texas.
Item two: right-wing dread. OK, I know this is my fifth treatment of this somewhat obscure issue. I think it's burning out (or at least I am), so I think this will probably be the last word I have on it. Jonah Goldberg has followed up Monday's column with a take specifically on libertarianism and its fallacies as he sees them. Once again, I think, his protests to the contrary duly noted, he doesn't really get it. In his attempts to assert the ideological illegitimacy of libertarianism as compared to his supposed non-ideological conservatism, he once again elevates the latter to just as dogmatic a system as he accuses us of having. I don't really see libertarianism as being really that doctrinaire, though neither do my communist friends their beloved Marxism, so objectivity may be an illusion, even if he does see it that way (or maybe he's just scared of thick books). But even if it involves definite principles articulated with nuance, I think Jonah remains confused about what exactly they entail (for example, he keeps holding on to the idea that it is a principle of child rearing, which as Virginia Postrel points out, it isn't, though Murray Rothbard did write an essay called "Kid Lib"). He also misses out that there are a lot of different types of libertarian and that it is a pretty much self-defined thing. After all, Noam Chomsky calls himself libertarian, which it seems to me no apologist for the Khmer Rouge has any right whatsoever to do. Postrel and Gillespie are a specific type, namely Hayekian progressives if I may use such an invented term. That is pretty much where I fall in as well, as do most of the more mainstream libs. There are also, though, Randians, who mix ultra-capitalist theory with Nietzshian ethics and aesthetics. Then the Lewrockwell.com folks, whom he cites, are the Dukes of Hazzard variety, Lincoln-hating apologists for Confederate treachery (never mind that human slavery bit). Virginia Postrel and I have both had our word about this variety. So I think that Goldberg needs to pick a narrower target for his attacks. By trying to caricature all of the varieties of libertarian thinking in one go, he has managed to create a straw man with no resemblance to any specific, actual libertarians.
That is very much the problem with Goldberg in general, his relentless caricaturing of the opposition. It's very funny when he does it to the loony left, but he seems to lose his sense of humour when it comes to the libertarians. I take this a bit personally (though not as personally as he suggests; I don't know about libertarians as a rule, but I have pretty thick skin and am pretty flexible when it comes to applying my principles to a complicated reality). The real problem, though, is that by elevating conservatism, however inadvertantly, to an ideology, he generally misses who the opposition at any point is. A case in point is his vehemently anti-French prejudice, which came out in his rebuttal to Andrew Sullivan. A student of Burke, he takes the position that the French revolution was a bad thing because it disrupted the existing order and involved a small group imposing its idea of society on the populace, and violently. OK, that's fine; both the Jacobin Terror and the derivitive Bolshevik Terror have influenced conservative and libertarian thinking, most notably in the writings of Von Mises and Hayek (whom we would call libertarians more readily than conservatives, Jonah).
But two points remain: first, the ideology of the Jacobins vis à vis the ancien régime was more in line with contemporary values, including conservative values, than absolutism is: e.g., bourgeois freedoms, suffrage, accountability in taxation, an end to serfdom, etc. So what Goldberg is left opposing are their methods. What they wanted was mostly good (though not entirely), but they just oughtn't to have gotten them then. Patience, Jacques, patience (easy to say when you weren't one of the ones facing starvation). In other words, means are what matter to him, not ends. His ideology is about a process, not actual values. Rather amoral, don't you think? Of course, the ends don't always justify the means (it's too facile to say never as people are wont to do), and the Jacobin means were destructive and, as Robert Conquest eloquently notes in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, gave birth to the destructive millenarian utopianism that culminated with Marxism and its bastard nephew, fascism. But, remember, their revolution - unlike Lenin's - failed of its own accord.
Secondly, if artificial social arragements enforced from the top are such a horror to Goldberg, why is he defending absolutism? That he seems to imagine the ancien régime as being the product of generations of tradition, careful evolution, trust in past authority, and all those things he likes so much, shows he has utterly misread the historical record. Bourbon despotism was a the product of a deliberate 150 year program instituted by a few French monarchs and their ministers to destroy the existing order of France. It was the most revolutionary political program in European history up until 1789. Over that time, civil society was essentially destroyed, most aspects of the economy, culture and politics were brought under the control of bureaucrats at Versailles, the "feudal federalism" (my term) was abolished, existing authorities (i.e., the nobility) were marginalized, and the Catholic faith Goldberg admires so was subordinated to Bourbon political will. Taxes more than tripled, mostly over a two decades during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). In other words, it was a combination of twentieth century totalitarianism (which he professes to hate) and modern French technocracy (which he professes to hate). Yet those who challenged this regime were "perfidious." Why are twentieth century bureaucrats in Washington telling us all what to do anathema, but eighteenth century bureaucrats in Paris copasetic? Why were the Founding Fathers heros fighting against taxation without representation heros, but the women marching on Versailles so repugnant? (As a side note, I've often thought that if our contemporary conservative politicians and pundits had been around in 1775, they would mostly have gone to Canada.) And hasn't he ever noticed that Colbert's economic policies were pretty similar to Pat Buchanan's? Make up your mind, Jonah: do you stand for anything concrete or not? I think he does, and I wish he would realize his fetishization of conservatism (which, as I've said, is a legitimate and natural human urge to a certain extent) is interfering with his ability to articulate it. In the mean time, I usually enjoy his columns when he doesn't get off on these freakish tangents, so even if he doesn't get it all figured out, I wish he'd just leave us the hell alone and get back to what he does well.
Thursday, December 20, 2001 (1:05am)
I just realized that, at 2,260 words (eight double spaced pages), my entry this morning is about the same size as some of the papers that tormented me so much this term, yet written in a minute fraction of the time. The shit of it is, this here probably makes more sense. Have I mentioned I'm glad the semester is over?
Monday, December 24, 2001 (10:25pm)
'Tis the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring except for two fat cats in front of the wood burning stove and one geek at his laptop.
In spite of this annus horribilis, we all have a whole lot to be grateful for. We live in a rich, beautiful land. It is an age of unprecedented material comfort and progress. In spite of a thousand dire predictions, we are still as safe and free as we were before September 11. And, after tomorrow, we won't have to hear the Jackson 5 singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" for another eleven months.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Thursday, December 27, 2001 (12:54pm)
'Twas a holly, jolly Christmas this year, and I hope you all had lovely ones too, assuming you had ones at all (to the rest, Happy Hallmark Potlatch). I've had a pretty good few days and there is a lot that would be worth talking about, but I would rather go to bed now. I'm just writing because there's nothing on TV but skin flicks and the news, so I thought I'd check my messages. There weren't any, but I notice I got a mention at Virginia Postrel's site, so if you are interested you ought to have a look. I'll give you the 411 on the rest of my week later on.
Wednesday, January 2, 2002 (4:59pm)
Happy New Year, to one and all! It's been a long time since I've posted, what with Christmas excitement and all. I've also been out of town for a few days, on a roadtrip with friends - a real redneck operation - so this site has been a very low priority. I'll get around to doing a comprehensive update sometime - probably in the next few days, though possibly not until after I get back to school. It could also be in stages. In the mean time, here are a few things to ponder over:
- Just to be fair to Jonah, whom I've ripped into a bit on here lately, though not as much as some others have, I did quite enjoy his column today.
Anyway, that's enough for the meantime. Enjoy and I'll be back with you soon.
Thursday, January 3, 2002 (12:15pm)
From the ever-interesting Korean Central News Agency:
New Year's celebrations across country
Pyongyang, January 1 (KCNA) -- The New Year's celebrations were held yesterday in factories, enterprises and on co-op farms in different parts of the DPRK on the occasion of the New Year Juche 91 (2002). Among them were the Kim Jong Thae Electric Locomotive Factory, the East Pyongyang Thermal Power Plant and the Kim Chack Iron and Steel Complex.
The performers put on stages a series of art pieces reflecting their determination to adorn the new year which greets the 90th birth anniversary of President Kim Il Sung with new creation and changes.
They vowed to take the lead in the drive of the significant new year, too, holding higher the torch of surge and innovation in the era of army-based policy.
Celebrations also took place on the co-op farms across the country including those in Kangwon and North Phyongan provinces.
I don't know how you spent your New Year's celebrations, but I sure wasn't at my state factory dancing and singing at gunpoint to affirm my support for "army-based policy." I was drunk as a skunk back here in the free world with two larval Navy officers. God bless and preserve capitalism.
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